There is Only One Ghost in the World by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller
Fiction Collective 2, University of Alabama Press, 2023
There is Only One Ghost in the World is a fragmented, sinewy collection of vignettes, or prose poems, or little pieces of memory by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller. The untitled pieces are intimate and at times harrowing, often laced with a potent nostalgia for childhood and the past. The book slips in and out of first and second person, and between present and past tense, creating a dizzying patchwork of narration, point of view, and experience:
Someone tells you that Brian Wilson wrote “God Only Knows What I’d Be Without You” to impress his father. His father wasn’t impressed. Years later, he went to see his childhood home and there was only an overpass, and the shambled dirt all overpasses hold beneath them. The arc of eulogy. You want to put a heron in the eulogy, an egret. A living shape that stills the sky.
When the poems do look outward, it’s through a surreal and haunting menagerie of images: a litany of names for the moon, acts of physical or sexual violence, cell phones and emails, the names of slot machines in a casino. The poems also call in a colorful assortment of companion texts; Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, articles from the New York Times, literary essays, and Earth Wind & Fire lyrics all weave together into a kaleidoscopic reading experience that suggests, yes, “The world is dense, and intimate, and strange.”
Written over the span of 8 months during the early Coronavirus pandemic (November 2020-August 2021) via a shared Google doc, the text wrestles, or muses over, or dances slowly with the concepts of loss, memory, and isolation. What does it mean to remember? Is memory a kind of decay? “A piece of what elegy can do is hold an absence by naming it,” one speaker states. In this book, each poem is a small act of resurrection—building a ruined place again, placing flesh on a skeleton or dolls in a dollhouse—to re-enact the scene that changed you, and then to ask, “What now?”
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Hannah Cruz is a poet and multidisciplinary artist living in Chicago, IL. You can find her poetry and photography online at Chaotic Merge Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, and Moon Cola.